1896. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 13 



Professor Ray Lankester. 



We go to press early this month, so that what is new now 

 may be a matter of common knowledge when this number is 

 published. But we have the greatest pleasure in giving additional 

 publicity to the appointment of Mr. Edwin Ray Lankester as a 

 vice-president of the Royal Society. When Professor Lankester was 

 a boy at school he became interested in fossil fish, and Huxley, who 

 was a family friend, encouraged him in his pursuit, and was the 

 external cause of his first important scientific publication, a 

 monograph of the Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone. At 

 Oxford he was a pupil of Rolleston's and a contemporary and 

 friend of Moseley. His subsequent career as Jodrell Professor at 

 University College, and as the present holder of the Linacre Chair at 

 Oxford, is known to everyone. Were Francis Balfour alive, Lankester 

 and Balfour would be the two great representative names of the latter 

 part of the century among English morphologists. As it is, the older 

 school has disappeared, and Professor Lankester alone occupies a 

 great gap between Huxley and a host of younger men, many of whom 

 are eminent, but none of whom is yet conspicuously in front of his 

 fellows. 



Professor Karl Pearson's Reply to Mr. Balfour. 



We did not notice Mr. Balfour's " Foundations of Belief" in the 

 part of our columns devoted to new books, for two reasons. The part 

 of his interesting argument dealing with religion necessarily is outside 

 the scope of Natural Science. The part which dealt with the 

 foundations of science we were unable to recognise as having anything 

 to do with any modern branch of scientific thought. The majority of 

 scientific men pursue their studies and investigations without troubling 

 about the metaphysical difficulties that lie behind, not only scientific 

 thought, but all thought. Mr. Balfour seemed to us to imagine that 

 science necessarily identified itself with the old, crude materialism of 

 the Hall of Science School. It is quite true that Moleschott and 

 Buechner many years ago identified scientific concepts with 

 " things-in-themselves," but the few modern scientific men — such 

 as Huxley, Clifford, and Karl Pearson — who have touched upon 

 metaphysics, took the greatest pains to make clear that they were not 

 " materialists." 



As we did not review Mr. Balfour's book, we cannot find space 

 for Professor Karl Pearson's criticism. But those who are interested 

 in such ultimate problems should make haste to send to Mr. William 

 Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, the pubhsher of" Reaction! "by Karl Pearson, 

 price fourpence. We can assure them that they will find the pamphlet 

 exceedingly interesting, and even though they may not agree with 

 Professor Pearson, he will satisfy them that Mr. Balfour's treatment 

 of science was a mere burlesque. 



